Google acquires HTC’s design crew, closes $1.1 billion deal.

Google welcomed the HTC’s smartphone design division on board after it finally closed the $1.1 billion deal which saw the addition of almost 2,000 HTC engineers to it’s hardware division.

This speaks of a serious move by them to expand it’s hardware efforts and more obviously, contribute to it’s line of Pixel smartphones. The team will remain in Taipei only, according to sources Taipei is becoming the biggest engineering hub in the Asia-Pacific region for Google. HTC’s manufacturing and VR division remains unaffected,however a majority of the R&D department is now a part of the Pixel team now. According to sources, Google had already worked with a part of the HTC team on a contract basis for the Pixel and Pixel 2.

Currently Google’s smartphones, namely the Pixel and Pixel 2, are aimed just to compete against the high-end market leaders like Apple and Samsung but they definitely have plans to expand their lineup and breach the mainstream smartphone market. Despite Pixels being great phones, they still lag in terms of no. of smartphones shipped. The HTC deal marks this very effort by them to finally up the game and make themselves an integral part of the Android smartphone market.

Speaking of this deal, SVP Hardware at Google, Rick Osterloh, in his blogpost hailed the HTC team as an “incredibly talented team to work on even better and more innovative products in the years to come.”

In an interview with Bloomberg, Osterloh also admitted, other Android manufacturers “know why we’re doing this”, he added, “Quite honestly, Apple is doing really well in developed markets.”

Whatever the future holds for Google’s foray into mainstream smartphone development, it promises to be good if the Pixel series is anything to go by and with the addition of the HTC team to the Pixel team, we thoroughly anticipate the result of this union.